Stop the world...

This morning when I was recording field notes in UE1 I found myself hitting the tab key in order to pause the flow of visual and auditory information that I was perceiving so that I could figure out what I wanted to say about it before moving on. It didn't work. The scene around me continued to unfold as I sat and struggled for words and I had to make the choice between missing what was happening now or giving up on writing down what I had just seen.

The kind of real-time collaborative note-taking that we are doing is new to me. Usually when I take field notes they are very minimal--noting who is present, the nature of the activity in very broad terms (e.g., lunch, gardening, book-reading), times, and anything I notice that I think I will want to remember later--especially if I am not sure it is well captured by the camera. But I am specifically not counting on my field notes to capture what is going to be interesting to me in the video data--rather, I know I (or someone) will watch the video later, log the content, and tag moments of interest for close transcription and analysis. This is time-consuming, though, and there's a lot to be said for generating something like a content log--the kind of documentation that will be useful for identifying segments--while the video is being recorded. It is clearly valuable for this kind of event, in which we are trying to do as much as we can together in the short time that we have. So I think that I have been trying to do something like I do when I am taking field notes during this workshop. This is not quite possible in real-time, which leads to futile efforts to stop time with my left pinky finger.

I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but there seem to be some interesting differences in the ways that videographers on the team are doing field notes. These differences may be lessening over time, which I guess is what you would expect. I come from a tradition in which a basic assumption is that anything that human beings do is potentially worthy of analysis. I also know that it is virtually impossible for an observer to detect everything that is possibly significant by viewing an event once, in real-time. Those two premises motivate me to try to document everything I can in the field notes. On the other hand, even though all human activity is potentially researchable, the particular researchers here (including myself) have interests that will lead them to seek certain kinds of episodes instead of others. Given the limitations of what one can actually possible notice and record in real-time, it would seem that the best use of field notes is to try to focus in on phenomena that seem relevant to the research goals of the investigators and tag them in ways that will be findable later on. Strangely, though, while limiting oneself in that way would seem to make writing field notes easier, I find it difficult. Though I know I do not catch (anywhere close to) everything, once I have noticed something it is hard to disregard and not record it--deciding whether or not to record it is a cognitive step that takes more time than I have in this situation.

More later on field notes, content logs, and transcription.